Many web sites rely on revenue from Internet advertising to provide financial support for their operation. Such web sites, sometimes referred to as “publisher sites” or “publishers,” typically include one or more paid advertising messages in each web page they serve to a user visiting the publisher site. Such inclusion is often referred to as “presenting” an advertising message to the user requesting (i.e., “visiting”) the page.
Typically, a user may click on or otherwise select such ads to navigate to a different web page providing more information about the advertiser or the specific subject of the advertising message. While publishers use a variety of different pricing models for such advertising, under many of these pricing models, an advertiser only pays a publisher for inclusions of its advertising message that are selected by the users to whom they are presented, or for inclusions that users select and then perform some subsequent action, such as purchasing a product.
Publishers have an incentive to maximize the extent to which the advertising messages presented to each user are relevant to that user. First, the greater extent to which the advertising messages presented to a particular user are relevant to that user, the more revenue the publisher can expect to derive from presenting advertising messages to the user. Second, users that receive advertising messages that they find relevant are less likely to feel bombarded by information that they find unhelpful.
Publishers typically use one of two different conventional approaches to selecting advertising messages for presentation to users. In a first conventional approach, the publisher analyzes the contents of each page of the publisher web site to identify any subjects to which the page relates. The publisher then uses correspondences between advertising messages and subjects to select advertising messages corresponding to select, for all users visiting a particular page, advertising messages that correspond to the subjects to which the page is identified as relating. While in many cases it can be productive to include on a page advertising messages relating to the page's subject, the first conventional approach has the disadvantage that publisher sites often have several pages that don't have a subject, such as a home page and a terms of use page—many of them receiving significant user traffic—for which the first approach is unable to select a relevant advertising message. Further, in some cases in which the page does have a discernable subject, an advertising message targeted to a user determined to have a certain interest that is different from that subject may be more successful than an advertising message relating to the page.
In a second conventional approach, the publisher monitors each user's behavior on the publisher site, such as the set of pages of the publisher site the user visits. This user behavior information is used once each day to assign each user to a group of users, or “segment,” thought to all share a common interest. In the second conventional approach, the publisher selects advertising messages for presentation to a user based upon the segment of which the user is a member, without regard for the identity or subject of the page on which the advertising message is presented. The second conventional approach has the disadvantage that, until a user accumulates a history at the publisher site and is assigned to a segment, there is no useful basis for selecting advertising messages that user. Further, segment assignment may in some cases be erroneous, rendering advertising messages selected based on segment membership less effective. Also, in some cases in which the user has been correctly assigned to a segment, an advertising message selected based upon the subject of the page may be more effective than an advertising message assigned based upon the user's segment.
In view of the foregoing, an approach to selecting advertising messages for presentation that overcame some or all of the shortcomings of the above-described conventional approaches would have significant utility.